Walk around any open space in the wealthier parts of London these days and the chances are that sooner or later a pack of dogs will stampede past. Should you avoid getting trampled in the rush, you will see, labouring behind them, a shabby and mud-spattered figure, clutching a variety of leashes, hanging on to an animal or two and calling on the rest of his charges to behave themselves. Usually, as these are posh beasts – well fed, good pedigrees, affluent owners – they don’t. This is almost certainly because nobody could be bothered to train them.
Social change often identifies itself through its caricatures. The professional dog-walker, figure of fun though he or she may be, is a talisman of the fundamental shift that has occurred in the economies of developed countries, Britain particularly, in recent decades. A measure of this was the publication shortly before Christmas of the worst monthly trade figures since records began in the 17th century. Had this been the 1960s – or even the 1970s – the size of the deficit, particularly in manufacturing, would have had an IMF team on the next flight to Heathrow. In 2002, bar a little huffing and puffing from the heavy-metal rump of the CBI, the event almost passed without notice.
Since the 1960s work has been dematerialised – turned into a quality rather than a quantity. In the UK, we no longer make things so much as do things – for other people. Adam Smith perfectly captured the ephemeral nature of such a business in his remark that services “generally perish in the instant of their performance and seldom leave any trace or value behind them”, but it seems that Smith was wrong, because we do appear to be creating value, and therefore making a living, out of it. But it’s an extraordinary change. In the 1960s, remember, the Wilson government viewed services as the enemy of economic progress to the extent that it imposed a Selective Employment Tax to discourage service industries from hogging too many workers. Growth was then driven by manufacturing productivity alone.
The rise of the service sector is one of the big stories of the late 20th century. Nine out of every ten new jobs created in the US – and more than 70 per cent of British employment – is in services. In Britain’s mid-19th-century manufacturing heyday, by contrast, the figure was less than a third. But it is not merely an economic narrative; it also describes a process of social evolution. Economic power and value, like money itself, is etherealising towards a state of pure information – so services such as IT, education and media are booming. Proliferating regulation, legislation and social complexity produce a proliferation of lawyers, accountants, expert advisers. We are much richer – so the City, which manages our wealth, impresses its values and habits on society at large. And we are increasingly remote from reality, in the sense that we want jobs done – but do not wish to do them ourselves. We prefer to sit in offices manipulating symbols; we choose image over substance, form over content.
The habit of delegating unwanted tasks to underlings is one we associate with older forms of service (the great houses of the feudal aristocracy, for example), but it is strange to find it infecting the empowered middle classes of the 21st century – and not particularly appetising. Studies by the Institute of Manpower Studies in the 1990s demonstrated the insecurity and inequality of the “new economy” of flexible labour markets, outsourcing, contract working and self-employment. Self-employment, the institute found, was characterised by extremes of high and low pay, with the better-off over-represented in banking, finance and business, and the poorest in personal and domestic services such as hairdressing and cleaning. It was not only exacerbating wider social inequality, according to the institute; the economic penalties it carried persisted into old age. And for many “flexibly employed” people, the new economy was not an invigorating world of economic freedom and dynamism – the picture new Labour likes to portray. At the bottom end of the market, in particular, it was a universe of constraint and financial penalty.
No one worries much about these things any more. As with other issues once deemed outrageous – the soaring prison population, the excesses of executive pay – the world has found it can tolerate them and moved on. Indeed, we now greet with something approaching approbation the dotcom-style wheezes dreamt up by “entrepreneurs” to lighten the load of the new ruling classes. High-powered City types take on “lifestyle managers” to perform those troublesome household tasks that are just too, well, time-consuming to bother with – shopping, gardening, finding a plumber, buying a present, organising a holiday. Giving a dinner party? Hire a butler and caterers. Nanny let you down? Get another one. And though butlers may be the prerogative of a minority, cleaners, au pairs, childminders are not. In the outer economic penumbra, meanwhile, a fleet of invisible minions – the bar staff, the waiters, perhaps most important, the carers – maintains the elite in the style to which it is accustomed.
Servicing the professional classes is thus, now, the fastest growing area of the labour market, but given that much of it looks suspiciously like paying somebody else to live your life for you, it is reasonable to ask where it’s all leading. Granted, if you make £1,000 an hour, it makes economic sense to pay somebody a tenner to walk your dog, but what sort of existential sense does it make? Is it right to set yourself up as a latter-day feudal fiefdom, a kind of post-capitalist mill owner paying near-minimum wages to a customised domestic proletariat of dependants? To be specific, what’s the point of having a dog if you don’t take it for a walk? Come to that, why have a child if others then serve as its parents? More fundamentally, are we content to see an old aristocratic feudalism resurrect itself, after the better part of a century in which we thought it all dead and buried, as a new middle-class feudalism?
The question goes to the heart of our notions about class and it is clear that part of what we are witnessing is another chapter in the history of embourgeoisement. Most eras of rapid economic growth see the newly affluent aping the tastes and habits of their erstwhile social “superiors” and the past two decades, in which per capita GDP in the UK has grown by a remarkable 60 per cent in real terms, are part of this pattern. Where they differ is that the extra disposable income, instead of flowing into goods, has gone into services – partly, no doubt, because we are at or near saturation point with videos and three-piece suites. Hence it is no coincidence that during the same period, household spending on domestic services stopped declining – this happened at the end of the 1970s – and began the reincarnation we are witnessing today. To describe the new master classes, meanwhile, we have a catchy label – the “mass affluent”, those earning £50,000 or more a year and/or with at least £50,000 to invest. In the UK, according to the market research group Mintel, four to five million people fall into this category; in Europe as a whole there may be 60 million.
There is another important difference, however. None of this was supposed to happen. Unlike the rise of the mercantile classes, who took their new money out into the shires, bought or built their country seats and stepped into the accents and costumes of the landed gentry, the nouveaux riches of the late 20th century had higher aspirations – once. They were brought up in an atmosphere saturated with progressivist beliefs, most of which taught that living off the fruits of somebody else’s labour was a practice that had been, or ought to be, banished to the past. Read the utopian socialists and their successors – Proudhon, Morris,Tolstoy, Gandhi – and you find that a pervasive theme is the decency of autonomous labour, the virtues of doing things for yourself, rather than paying someone else to do it for you. This was one fundamental meaning of emancipation – whether it was women from domestic chores or workers from the slavery of wage labour – and the point seemed reinforced by what Eric Hobsbawm has called the cultural revolution of the 1960s, with its liberationist rhetoric, its ideology of individual fulfilment, its (feminist) doctrine that the personal, ultimately, was political. Or, as Hobsbawm wrote in The Age of Extremes: “Personal liberation and social liberation went hand in hand.”
Well, they don’t – not any more. One person’s liberation and fulfilment is, it seems, another’s servitude. Feminism has brought emancipation for some women – and subjugation for others. For both sexes, the challenge of “having it all” – a plausible theory, a not ignoble ideal – has turned into a series of empty gestures, tasks performed by surrogates in which one’s only exertion is the wielding of a credit card. Marx’s word for this was commodification and it is clear that ever larger parts of our lives are being stripped of the personal and the experiential and turned into branches of the global economy. One doesn’t really want a dog – one wants the idea of a dog, as one wants the idea of a Rolex watch or Armani suit. In that sense, a dog is merely a brand, a desired accessory to a hypothesised life, and a dog-walker is a kind of brand manager.
What may well distinguish the mass affluent from previous generations of the newly rich, however, is their guilt. Thanks to their progressivist breeding, they have qualms about enslaving others and are sometimes aware that they have only one life so they may as well live it. And this, in turn, may explain the otherwise inscrutable episode of Cheriegate, when the private life of the first recognisably contemporary family to occupy Downing Street – baby-booming, dual-income, careerist, aspirational – was exposed to full view and the nation saw, with something approaching horror, its own reflection. Here were most of the storylines of the new feudalism: the obsession with appearances, the retinue of retainers, the narcissistic New Age-ism. The Bristol flats were a kind of rhetorical flourish. Everyone’s doing it – buying property as an investment – but how do emancipation, liberation and fulfilment square with signing up with such apparent eagerness to the notion of a rentier economy?
We have our excuses, naturally. We cite the pressures of work, the difficulties of “juggling”. We sense dimly that we are on a competitive merry-go-round, that jumping off is fraught with peril. It may well be that we are caught up in some state-change of society, something to do with the virtualisation of existence, the creeping replacement of the natural with the abstract, for which the best descriptions lie in biology or evolutionary theory. As for our dogs, it would be better if instead of choosing them as a pedigree lifestyle accessory, we abandoned the whole idea of breeding (which produces artefacts, not animals, and malformed ones at that) and provided a home to the thousands that now languish in rescue centres, like so much post-consumer waste. Who knows, we might even walk them ourselves. A bit of honest toil, and some fresh air, never harmed anyone.
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